


Kara Zor-El

by blatant_sock_account



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: AU: essentially just cherrypicking the parts of canon I like tbh, Above all else this is about the Danvers sisters being the best, Alex is in the midst of her teenage rebellion phase and Kara thinks she's like the coolest ever, Clark Kent and Eliza are mentioned, Coming Out, Gen, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-23 17:21:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10723803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blatant_sock_account/pseuds/blatant_sock_account
Summary: “And while you have your eyes closed,” Alex says, “how about you tell me what’s been bothering you.”“Um,” you say. You take a moment to collect your thoughts, untie your tongue, and try again: “Uh.” You focus on the sound of the Rubik’s Cube she's fiddling with and her fingers brushing against the cheap plastic. “I think I maybe don’t like my name,” is what you finally say. It’s not everything, but it is important. You’re still not sure whateverythingmeans for you yet, anyway.





	Kara Zor-El

**Author's Note:**

> I'd love to hear thoughts about this one in particular.

You don’t notice it when you first land, although that was perfectly understandable. You took in little other than your own sobbing, your eyes burning in the light, bleary figures yelling too-loud about what to _do_ with you. It’s subtle: seemingly not present at all when you learned how to tone out the noises ringing through your skull, a small feeling deep in your stomach when you started learning the basics of the English language, growing stronger and stranger when you began school, began seeing and interacting with others outside of your foster family. 

There’s something wrong, something off-balance. You barely know how to describe it. You feel it when you look at yourself in the mirror, when Eliza calls your name for dinner, when Alex grew frustrated one night and called you the most annoying little brother ever, and then again when Alex apologized not fifteen minutes later saying she was just still getting used to all of this and that honestly compared to her friends’ horror stories you were probably the best brother in the whole world. It leaves you feeling confused, as if there’s something going on that everybody can see but you. 

Your first instinct is that it’s the yellow sun, of course. Because your entire body has felt different since you came to this planet, light and hard and full of energy buzzing restlessly beneath your skin, itching to do _something_. You’ve had nothing but problems since you got here, between fighting to see things normally—to look at people’s faces when they talked and not their _skeletons_ moving about like the old Halloween Special cartoon Alex had showed you before you decided you hated all scary things ever—to the realization that you could actually cook something if you glared at it hard enough, and endless other discoveries of powers and abilities that your cousin was using to save lives while you could only manage to destroy your foster family’s property. Between everything else the yellow sun had caused, had done to you, an indistinct sense of discomfort seemed about par for the course.

-

You decide to call Clark. 

Talking to him is difficult, for many reasons. He was too old, a mentor where you were supposed to be a guardian. He left you, giving nothing but an explanation he was unable to translate into your language— _his_ language—and a phone number scrawled on a torn piece of paper to call ‘anytime’. Most of all, you’ve learned that he is a human in all but biology. While he can teach you how hard to pull a jammed door to open it without breaking anything, he cannot understand when you call him late at night pleading to tell him a bedtime story from home. Like you were supposed to have done for Kal. He will listen to you cry and awkwardly try to offer comfort, but it hurts to see that he cannot relate to the things that are so important to you. 

You dial his number, feeling an inexplicable urge to twirl the phone’s cord around your finger like a character from a sitcom.

He greets you, sounding genuinely happy to talk, and says it’s been a while. You barely acknowledge him, though, because there it is again, that feeling that the feet you’re staring down at are somehow not your own. 

You cut his greeting short. “Clark?” You’d once called him Kal, assuming the name ‘Clark’ to be a temporary identity he would use when in public and couldn’t be called by his real name without suspicion. You now suspect that there is no Kal. “Does the yellow sun cause anything that might make you, like, I guess uncomfortable with yourself? Like there’s something wrong with your body?”

“Oh, uh,” you hear him stutter, apparently less familiar with the feeling than you’d expected, and you think to yourself that this was a bad idea. The more you come to understand the new social cues around you, the worse talking to him has made you feel. He has no idea what to do with you, you understand, and he doesn’t necessarily want a confused teenager in his life. It hurts to look back at your earlier conversations and realize the ways that he would dodge away from anything other than technical questions, the ways he was trying to dismiss you that you hadn’t even _noticed_. “You know, I think that’s just sort of a growing up thing. You should try talking to Eliza, or, um. Someone. It’s something that happens to humans, too.” 

“Okay, well. Thanks.” You want to tell him that you need _his_ advice, not just _someone’s_. “I’ll talk to someone.” 

-

You talk to Alex, because she’s the nicest, coolest, smartest person you know. 

It. Doesn’t go well.

Which is weird to you, because usually Alex is patient with your questions unless she’s got a test the next day. She watches TV shows with you and explains all the jokes and phrases you didn’t understand over the commercials. She was the one to explain in-depth the euphemisms the boys in school would use around you and which ones were particularly mean to say. She stayed with you during all your struggles to get control of your powers, and she’d let you crawl into her bed at night during the first months of your life here when you’d been woken by nightmares and could barely remember a word of English besides her name through your tears. 

“Have you ever, like, felt like there’s something about you that’s different from the way you’re supposed to be?” You ask, “Or like that’s different from everyone else? And it makes you feel like you’re standing out and there’s something wrong?”

But Alex’s shoulders had tensed up in the way that they do when you ask a particularly inhuman question when she’s in front of her friends, and she glares at you in a way you hadn’t really seen since she was still complaining about having a sibling, so long ago. 

“No,” she says, and turns her chair back to her desk and the messy stack of papers on top of it. 

You’re hurt, honestly, and a little bit nervous, and even a little bit guilty, like there was some cultural boundary you hadn’t yet heard of that you’d managed to cross and now Alex hated you forever. “I—I just,” you stutter, and see her shoulders drop, hear her sigh just below her breath. “I tried to talk to Clark, but he said it was a human thing? Not an alien superpower thing? So, I thought—I’d ask you?” 

“No, he’s right,” Alex says, soft. “It’s a common thing—for some people. I don’t know, though, I don’t think I can help with that.”

You don’t want to tell her that you’re running out of people to talk to. That your list was pretty much just her and Clark, because you didn’t want to trouble Eliza when she was already clearly so worried about you blending in and being a perfectly normal human who didn’t ever feel like they were the target in a great practical joke, the entire world shifting the furniture an inch to the left at a time and chuckling at you when you couldn’t understand why things felt out-of-place. 

Instead, you smile, say thank you, and try to ignore the way she immediately turns towards her homework. 

-

One of the first English phrases you’d learned, before you’d been taught of structural rules and were instead given a shopping list of important things to memorize, was how to introduce yourself, to say “I am Alex Danvers’ brother.” It hadn’t bothered you when you’d learned it, or even for a while after. You liked it, even, because Alex is the most important thing to you on Earth, and you wanted everybody to know that you understood yourself best by your relation to her. 

Your English was clinical; memorized definitions and how they translated back into Kryptonian. A brother (noun) was a human male sibling or colloquially a close male friend. No inherent emotional connotations, but could informally be shortened to the diminutive ‘bro’ to indicate familiarity. You’d practiced repeating your introduction to Eliza until you were able to say it perfectly, without tying your tongue over the vowels. 

A simple statement of fact. 

You don’t understand why you’re uncomfortable saying it now. It’s changed from an early reassurance tying you to the best person in your life to one of the things throwing you off-kilter, and you don’t _understand_. 

-

You wind up at a public computer at the school’s library, of all places. Because you haven’t gotten used to Earth computers yet (you’re used to voice activated holograms, and typing still feels strange and clunky), and Alex won’t show you how to delete the browser history on the family’s shared computer because she apparently finds it just hilarious to open your search history and make fun of you for asking Google about where to find petting zoos for birds. 

You think things would be less funny if anyone saw “Google why does my body feel wrong?” added to the history. 

You’re amazed to find an article with a similar title to your vague, confusingly worded question that you have no way of articulating any better, and by the fourth paragraph of it you’ve made a short list of unfamiliar terms, relieved to finally have some sort of direction. 

-

You leave the library and walk home with your head down, close the door to your room and hide under your space-patterned bedsheet.

-

Searching the internet clarified things, is the problem. You were surprised to find yourself reading dozens of different stories written about or told by human teenagers around your age and finding that they were perfectly putting to words the vague, shadowy sense of discomfort you’d never understood. You’d learned proper English terms, finally found others who were willing to describe the things you’d been feeling without making you ask someone else, been able to read about and understand what feelings and experiences you related to the most. 

Transgender was the English term. 

There was no Kryptonian equivalent. And so that can’t be you. 

-

Because you’re a _Kryptonian_ , not a human. You _have_ to be, you’re the last one. The last son of the noble House of El—or at least, the last to remember what it was like to walk under a red sun. You can’t sacrifice that, sacrifice the last tiny, fraying tether of Krypton culture just to have an experience that was human. That’s—that’s more than selfish. It’s terrible. 

-

It’s harder to ignore how alien you feel in your own skin when you’re aware of what’s causing it. Because now there’s not just a problem, there’s an answer. There’s a part of you that wants to shy away when the boys at school call you certain monikers, a part that wants to sink into your seat when a teacher calls your name, a part that wants—against all logic—to see your parents, to have their approval, to be back home where nothing was this confusing because your path in life was determined before you were even born. 

But you can’t, you can’t, you _can’t_ , because your name is a gift to take pride in. You were created the way you were supposed to be on Krypton, the way you would have been on Krypton. To change that would be akin to editing the house crest, opening it in an image editor and scribbling thick black lines all over, ruining the design and the beauty with your sloppy attempts to prove you could do a better job, to prove you could have a better life by embracing something completely alien.

You sit on the rooftop that night, looking at the stars and wishing for somebody to talk to, someone who would understand what it meant to be the last member of a dead culture. But there’s nobody but you, that’s sort of the whole problem.

-

You try talking to Alex again. More hesitant this time, more careful, trying to hide the meaning of your questions beneath enough layers of hypotheticals and evasions that she can’t work through your meaning. 

“Sometimes,” you start, spinning lazily in her swivel chair while she dangles her head upside-down from the bed. “Sometimes I feel like I want to be a different kind of person than what my parents planned for me, you know?” Vague, good. 

Alex huffs out a laugh. “Welcome to, like, my whole life, man!” 

You swallow, thick in your throat. “Yeah, but…” You don’t want to be indelicate, you’ve grown to hate the way the world stops to a halt when your foster family is reminded of your past. “I feel like I sort of have to? Like, otherwise I’m disrespecting their memory. I’m the last one, but sometimes I want to do things that Kryptonians, like, didn’t _do_.” 

Because there’s no precedent to this. At least as far as you know (and, oh, the thought of how much of your heritage died with Krypton on that day because you were too _young_ to understand it terrifies you more than you can ever express). Everybody was just… made right. And if anyone wasn’t, they sure didn’t tell you about it.

Alex flips herself upright, her hair covering her face messily. “That’s not, like, bad, you know? You’re on Earth, around humans. I think it’d be weirder if you didn’t want to do human things.”

“Yeah,” you say, noncommittal. “I guess.”

“Like, you don’t always have to be the ‘Model Alien’,” she quotes with her fingers. “In fact you kinda _can’t_ be if everybody thinks you’re human, anyway.”

You smile and scuff your foot against the floor, feeling just a bit lighter with Alex’s indirect support. You look up to her so, so much and you—you want her to be proud of you. 

Alex seems bolstered by your smile and leans towards you. “So what is it you want to do anyway? Is it getting a tattoo? Because I’ll bet you could talk Mom into letting us both go!” 

You laugh, spin yourself faster in the chair. “I think the people working there would be surprised when I broke all of their needles.”

As you rotate, you see Alex’s nose wrinkle. “Oh yeah, invulnerable super-strong alien. I forgot.” A loud, overdramatic sigh. “Maybe you can still convince Mom to let me get one…” 

“I think I’d be more likely to accidentally talk her into giving you another lecture about corrupting me.”

Alex rolls her eyes. “Logic,” she scoffs. 

And you bite your lip, press your feet on the floor to stop spinning as fast as possible, to make sure you don’t have enough time to talk yourself out of this like you have the two other times you thought of bringing this up.

“Um, Alex?” You say, and something in your tone must catch her attention, because she drops her scowl-y persona immediately. “Why did you change your name?”

“What?” Alex frowns, thinks for several seconds. “Do you mean my nickname?”

“I guess? Your name used to be Alexandra.”

Alex makes a face. “Ugh, yeah, I mean it still is. That. But I hate it, and I told people to call me Alex.”

You hesitate. “Just… just like that?” 

She shrugs, leans back against her pillow. “Kind of, yeah. Like, legally I guess, my name still is. Alexandra. But people don’t _call_ me that anymore. Make sense?”

No. “Sort of.” What is the difference between having a name and being called a name? “So you can just, like, ask to be called a different name?” 

“Sure, yeah.” Alex meets your eyes. “Why? Are you thinking about going by something else?” 

Your gaze drops back to the floor, to your feet awkwardly brushing against the carpet. You shrug. 

“Is that what you were talking about earlier, about wanting to be different? Because if so, I think you should go for it, yeah? Names are easy. You can just try one out, and if you hate the way it sounds you just stop using it. No commitment, no legally-binding changes to permanently dishonor your space family, it’s great.”

“Really?” Your voice is quiet, barely above a whisper, because you just. You want this to be true so bad. You want to be able to take baby steps, to change your mind and go back, and most of all to have Alex behind you offering support and bad space jokes. 

“Yeah, you know…” Alex sits up in bed, leans closer. “Okay if you tell anybody this I will find a way to murder you I swear to god, but, like.” She takes a deep breath, as if she’s preparing for something truly horrible. “Before I decided on Alex, there was a point where I was thinking of the name Lexa.” Her voice has dropped to a mumble, and she drapes an arm over her eyes dramatically, though you don’t fully understand her embarrassment. 

“It’s a good name,” you say.

“Oh my god, it’s _not_.” 

You shrug, although you’re smiling now, suddenly more comfortable in your own skin with Alex like this. “Thank you for telling me that, and for the advice. You’re the best sister.”

Alex matches your smile with a crooked grin of her own. “And you’re the best brother.”

-

_‘Google Earth names’_  
_‘Google American names’_  
_‘Google American girl names’_  
_‘Google American girl names normal’_  
_‘Google American girl names nice common’_

You find lists of thousands upon thousands of names, but nothing feels right. And you feel stupid, looking at names when you already _have_ one, as if anything could fit you better than the name you’ve been given, the name you were meant to have. Anything you could choose yourself would be a messy disguise, a thin, plastic Halloween mask that might hide your real face but would never look natural, would never be anything more than an obvious rejection of your legacy. Your cheeks burn, and you realize now that this was a bad idea. A stupid idea. You close everything and head to your room.

Later, you’re playing absently with the desktop zen garden Jeremiah had gotten you before he left, drawing shapes in the sand. The tiny tools are like glass in your hands, and focusing on not warping or snapping them between your fingers clears your mind. Alex knocks on your door, her usual rhythmic knock that she came up with one night so you would know who she was without having to use your x-ray vision, since you were still having so much trouble turning it _off_. 

You open the door to invite her in, but she lingers in the hallway, half-turned towards her own room like she was preparing to bolt down the hall at any second. 

“I cleared your browser history,” she says, not quite looking at you. “But, um, if you want to talk about stuff, you know where I live.”

-

You fill half a dozen pages of your notebook with your Kryptonian name. You write it carefully, both in Kryptonian and its approximation using the Roman alphabet, and you stare at the paper until your eyes start to blur, trying to make yourself like it the way you’re supposed to.

(It doesn’t work. 

Instead, you write your name real small in the margins as if it could fall right off the paper with the force of your uncertainty, and add the name of your father, as a daughter of the house would do. A Kryptonian tradition, just one that wasn’t meant for you.

 _Zor-El_.)

-

You write it again, and then ten more times. You keep a post-it note inside your clothes drawer, where you can see every night when you pick out your pajamas. It’s a bit like a secret; nobody knows its meaning. Most people you know don’t even know your real last name, and of those who do, none of them would know what it meant to adopt the name of your father, not even Kal—not even Clark. 

And you don’t think you want anyone to know what you’ve done, but at the same time you imagine Eliza or Alex stumbling across your note, asking the significance, somehow offering you advice that would channel the wisdom of Krypton and make you feel like you weren’t hiding away a shameful secret.

-

You’ve been avoiding Alex, just a little bit. There’s not really a reason for it.

(Except there is a reason for it. You’re not sure how to act around her. The first conversation you’d had about this with her, when you’d tried to ask for her experience and she’d slammed shut a metaphorical door in your face, lingers in your mind. You don’t know what caused it, because Alex has always been the one to tell you why your interactions with others didn’t go the way you’d expected. Losing her scares you more than anything else in the world.)

But, okay, you’ve been spending more time in your room, at least. Kind of avoiding her. And then, one afternoon she barges into your room, throwing open the door with a shout of “Older sibling privilege: we’re hanging out right now.” And, well, short of jumping out your window there’s not a whole lot you can do. 

She closes the door behind her and falls onto your bed, sprawling across it and pressing her ratty sneakers into your sheets. 

“You’ve been avoiding me,” she says bluntly. 

You turn away from her in your chair, fiddle with the Rubik’s Cube you were playing with before she came in. “Um, no I haven’t.” You’re a terrible liar.

“Knock it off,” she says. “What’s the deal? Are you okay?” And she says it like she’s tired or annoyed, like she’s way too cool to deal with whatever’s going on with you, but you’ve felt her eyes tracking you since she laid down, you can hear her nervous swallow, and it makes you feel a little bit better, knowing that she was maybe worried that you weren’t spending time with her. 

“I guess I don’t know?” You stare at the Rubik’s Cube. You could solve it in seven more spins, and you twist it in random directions to start over. 

“Here, gimme that.” Alex lifts one hand from the bed, lazily, making no effort to move any further. You toss her the Cube. “Close your eyes, no counting, no peeking through your eyelids like a creepy reptile monster.” 

You giggle, listening to the clicks as she resets the Cube for you. 

“And while you have your eyes closed,” she continues, “how about you tell me what’s been bothering you.” 

“Um,” you say. You take a moment to collect your thoughts, untie your tongue, and try again: “Uh.” You focus on the sound of the Rubik’s Cube and her fingers brushing against the cheap plastic. “I think I maybe don’t like my name,” is what you finally say. It’s not everything, but it is important. You’re still not sure what _everything_ means for you yet, anyway. But you find yourself talking again, falling into a ramble. “And it’s been a little, um. Hard. ‘Cause, like, it’s from Krypton, it’s one of the only things left. I can’t just not use it. Clark stopped using _his_ name and—and I mean it’s his choice, it’s not wrong, but I can’t also do that ‘cause then it’s like saying there’s something that was wrong with the last names from Krypton even though there’s _not_ , they’re wonderful, but… but I feel so bad about my name. It was fine for a while, but now when I hear it I get this gross feeling and it just seems like it’s getting worse! And—and it feels like the person I was supposed to be is all that I have left of home and my family, and I don’t want to lose that, but I don’t want to feel terrible all the time either, and I feel so _selfish_ for that.”

You didn’t mean to say all of that. At some point, Alex had stopped fussing with the Rubik’s Cube, and you’re afraid to open your eyes because you just _know_ that you’re about to cry. You pull your knees up to your chest and curl into yourself before a short sob escapes your mouth. Your hearing is muffled, like you’ve dunked your head underwater, but you are aware of heavy footsteps approaching you. 

You feel arms around your shoulders, squeezing tightly, and open your eyes to find Alex bending over awkwardly in front of you to hug you in your chair, and you’re overwhelmed with the thought that she’s just _so_ great before you bury your face into her shoulder, too afraid of losing control in this state to hug her back properly. 

She holds you while you cry, rubs your back while you dribble tears and snot on her ripped “American Idiot” t-shirt that she loves so much, and finally when you’ve calmed down to hiccupping against her shoulder she gives you an awkward pat on the back and says, “I love you a lot, but my back is going to actually break if we stay like this and lord knows I can’t move you on my own.” 

You laugh weakly and help her lug you to the bed. You’re not tired, it’s early in the afternoon, but she tucks you in anyway, draws your blankets right up to your chin like she did back when you were new to Earth and asking her to help you practice your English late at night. She pulls your chair over next to you and cracks her back loudly before sitting down. (You’d feel bad about that if she didn’t also sometimes do the same thing before sitting down to dinner, snickering at Eliza’s displeasure.)

“You know,” she says, “I don’t think—I think my whole name’s kind of dumb, but it never made me feel, like, gross, like you said. You shouldn’t have to feel like that all the time.” 

You pull your arms from beneath your blanket, full of nervous energy and wishing you had something to do with your hands. “It’s just. This didn’t happen on Krypton. Everything was already planned ahead for you, and there just weren’t mistakes.”

“What if there were, though?” Alex hands you back your Rubik’s Cube, and you look at it and guess. _Thirty-five or less_. “What if there were mistakes, but you just didn’t hear about them.” 

“I don’t know,” you mumble. _One, two, three_. “I’m just… scared, I guess.” _Six, seven, eight_. 

“Well, have you thought at all about what you’d want to be called instead?” 

You hesitate, dawdle, suddenly nervous. _Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen_. “Um,” _sixteen_ , “I was—uh,” _seventeen_ , “I was looking at names for girls.” _Eighteen, nineteen, twenty_. 

_Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three_. You look up, and Alex is already meeting your gaze. “I saw that. Earlier,” she says, and if nothing else you’re grateful that she seems to be as unsure as you. This isn’t the typical scenario where you are the confused, out-of-place alien trying to pretend you understood and enjoyed your classmate’s reference to a popular cartoon from the Nineties. You and Alex are in this together, equally in-over-your-heads, open in your uncertainty. 

“I’m not… sure, though,” you say, and kind of hope she gets that you’re talking about more than just your name without you having to say it outright—at least not yet. “I haven’t found one that feels right.” 

(You think of ‘Zor-El’ and how soft and warm it feels when you say it to yourself at night, in the shower, on the walk to school, anytime you’re alone. But ‘El’ isn’t the name people call you at school, isn’t the name you hear every day and that you want desperately not to resent because it’s the name your parents and your planet had wanted you to have.)

Alex smiles at you, small and uncertain but above all else promising, hopeful. “For now, how about I just avoid calling you a name that makes you feel uncomfortable?”

And you really don’t want to cry again because, darn it, you just got _done_ crying the first time. Instead of crying, though, you realize you’re smiling wide even with the feeling of tears threatening to slip down your cheek. 

“Have I ever mentioned that you’re the best sister ever?” you say. 

“Yeah, you have,” she puffs out her chest, putting on a show of being smug. “But I think you’re pretty great, too. Hey, how many was that?” 

You give her a confused look before she points to the Rubik’s Cube, solved in your hands. 

“I lost count,” you admit, smiling and sniffling at the same time. 

-

Alex doesn’t bring it up again. But the next day, when she tosses you a packet of Pop-Tarts before school, she calls out, “Think fast, kid.” 

-

(Later on, you initiate a large-scale pillowfight because “oh come on you big jerk I’m not that much younger than you!” But through Alex’s arguments that you’re, like, practically a _baby_ compared to her, the both of you are laughing, only interrupted temporarily by the thwack of a pillow to the face, and through all your completely righteous indignation you know you’re thrilled. Alex is there for you, and that’s what matters the most. The rest can fall into place later.)

-

One night, when it’s late and you can’t fall asleep, you wind up in her room.

(Well, you first wind up floating quietly to the kitchen to steal a tub of ice cream and two spoons, one of them tucked under the tub’s lid, hidden away.)

You knock your secret knock on her door, because if she got a secret knock then you needed one too. Alex opens the door with a smile that only grows wider when she sees you brought her favorite ice cream flavor, and she pulls you into her room. 

Her room is more of a mess than usual, littered with worn books from the library she’d been required to reference in her upcoming Bio paper. “Oh god, you are just the ice cream I was hoping to see right now. And hey to you too, kid.” 

“Oh, whoops!” You hope the way your eyes widen is convincing. Because you’re terrible at lying, but there is a distinct difference between lying and trying to mess with Alex. “I didn’t get you a spoon. Sorry, kid!” 

Alex stares you down, squinting at you like she’s trying to decide the best angle of attack. “You wouldn’t _dare_.” 

And you’d planned to keep it up a little bit, but you find yourself snorting at how genuinely murderous she looks in that moment. “You’re right,” you admit, and hand her your spoon, leaving the kind-of-sticky one for yourself. You don’t have any expensive books to touch tonight, after all. 

You hang around on her bed while she writes down notes and citations from one book and then another, passing the ice cream back and forth. She’s got music playing—well, sort of. She’s got headphones plugged into her MP3 Player, and while you suspect she doesn’t have it very loud, you can still hear the music she’s listening too, faint and tinny through the low-quality microphones, muffled by the padding. It’s softer than her usual style, ‘study music’ as she’d called it. 

When the ice cream tub is empty, you set it on her nightstand and lay back into her bed, staring up at her ceiling that looks so much emptier than yours without the glow-in-the-dark stars she thought were silly. You’re close to drifting off when you hear her groan, shove a book that looks alarmingly fragile onto the floor. “Make sure not to let me put my next assignment off so much, okay?” 

You hum, pretending to consider. “That’s what you told me to do for this assignment. And the one before that.” 

Alex groans again, louder. 

“Maybe you should take a break” is what you’d planned to say, but Alex is already slamming her notebook closed before you’re even halfway through.

“Great idea, kid. Best you’ve ever had.” She pulls off her headphones and rolls the chair over to the bed. Before you can even ask her just what she’s thinking about doing, her feet are propped on your stomach, her glorified ottoman.

“Gross!” You wrinkle your nose and put up a show of flailing around. (You can’t actually flail, you’d learned early on. You’ll put your arm through a wall.)

“Older sibling privilege.”

You eventually settle back, and the two of you just chat, have an impromptu Siblings Night. You talk about her classes, your classes, your art projects, her self-defense courses. You even try at one point to dig up more information about the guy at school she has a crush on, because it’s your right as her kid sibling to make sure this guy could even kind of be deserving of her, but like usual her answers are stilted and vague, and she switches the topic back to you. 

“I’ve actually, um, been thinking about some stuff,” you say, and though you don’t fully understand it you can tell she’s relieved to be talking about something else. 

“Yeah?”

“About Krypton, I guess.” Not a terribly specific thing to say, since most of the things you think about are related to Krypton, in some way or another. How could they not be? “Um, well, there’s this tradition—or, or convention, I guess—where daughters were given the names of their fathers as a surname in addition to their house.”

“Yeah?” Alex repeats. Her ankles are pressing into your stomach in a way that’s not really comfortable even for you, but at the same time it’s easier to talk like this, easier when you can feel her continuing to be right next to you regardless of the word-vomit spilling from your lips. 

“If—if I had been… I would be Zor-El, not just El.” Alex is quiet, and you’re not sure if enough time has passed for it to be awkward or not, so you just. Keep going. “And, um, I think it sounds kind of nice? And I feel like—I don’t feel like it’s wrong to like it more than just El, maybe, because it’s—they’re both Kryptonian. Just… different.”

You run out of words to say at that point, turn your head desperately to Alex for help. She’s already looking at you, though, and with more concentration than you’ve seen from her all night.

“You said it was a name for daughters, yeah?” You nod, nervous and cold and focusing everything you had on the feeling of Alex’s feet resting on you. “Do you… do you think you want—that?” 

And it’s an awkward, stumbling question, but you nod anyway and say, “Yeah, I think so.” 

Alex moves her feet from your stomach, and for a sharp, terrifying moment you think she’s just going to leave. Instead, she lays down beside you and wraps you up in a hug. “I’m so happy you’re figuring out things you like,” she says against the side of your head, letting you curl up into her. "I know you want to stick to how things were on Krypton—I mean, I don’t _know_ personally, obviously, but like. I know it’s important. But you really deserve to be happy. You don’t need to be uncomfortable being yourself all the time to remember your planet.”

And. And it’s so _much_ because she says things like ‘you deserve to be happy’ with such easy sincerity as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, when every day your mind is racked with fears that you are taking too much for yourself, not doing enough for others, failing, failing, _failing_ because you could be doing so much more for the world, giving so much more of yourself away. 

(Another way Clark has shaped your life here.)

You want to tell Alex how much her support means to you, how she’s been the best person in your life, how the reason you were even able to leave your room when you first arrived here was because you liked talking to her. But it all wells up in your throat, and all you can manage is a watery “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she says. A small smile grows on her face, curves into a worrying smirk. “Kid Zor-El.”

Your resulting shout wakes Eliza, and you’re sent to your room so that Alex can finish ‘accepting the consequences’ of her poor time management without further distraction. But while you leave you sneak a quick smile at her, and see her grinning back and looking not at all remorseful. You give her a small wave.

 _Zor-El_.

-

“Do you want to tell Mom?” Alex asks after school the next day, dark bags under her eyes. “I could help.”

“Maybe not now?” you say, adjusting your glasses.

“Okay, then. Our secret.”

-

Alex has stolen the good pillow from your bed and propped herself up against the wall of your room, intent on avoiding typing up a draft of her very same upcoming Bio paper. “Do you ever wish you had, like, girlier stuff?” 

You look somewhat self-consciously around your room. It’s fairly neutral, you think, with mostly blank walls and glowing stars on the ceiling. Your shelves are mostly full of toys and novelties to keep your hands busy, keep your powers in control, keep your mind occupied. Nothing particularly gender-specific, as far as you understand. 

You turn back to Alex. “I mean. You don’t have girly stuff.” 

She cringes and scratches at the back of her neck. “Yeah, you’re right. That was stupid. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” you say. “Honestly, I haven’t really thought about it.” 

And you supposed it makes sense, kind of. When you were learning how to blend in, you were just given certain things, especially clothes, without a whole lot of regard to your opinion. Which you had understood, since you’d longed for the clothes you could wear at home, and nothing from Earth could possibly hold up. 

But now. You’ve been wearing your plaids and your sweater-vests and your button-up shirts, but do you _like_ them? Would you _choose_ them?

(You think so, but you’re not sure.)

“I don’t know,” you answer again after a long while, maybe even long enough that Alex had forgotten the question. “I want to, maybe, _try_. Sometime in the future. It could maybe be—nice.” 

-

You’d given up looking for first names, for a while. But you have a thought one night, and you begin a list of all the Kryptonian names you know.

-

One night, you’re hanging out on the floor in Alex’s room with your biology textbook balanced on one knee and a dictionary on the other when she mentions—offhanded, cool and casual like she is—that you could try on the clothes Eliza and the rest of her family always buys her. You know. If you wanted to. No pressure. She twirls some hair—blue at the tips, from when she’d dyed it with Kool-Aid the previous week, which you thought was the coolest thing you’ve ever seen—around her finger like she’s trying to keep her hand busy, like it wasn’t at all a big deal. Like it wasn’t something you’ve maybe been thinking about, wondering if you’d like. 

(It _was_ though.)

You agree, and she seems to relax. It’s come up between you before, the clothes. You’d had trouble understanding why she didn’t like nice, pretty things. She’d gotten defensive and said they were _girly_ in a tone that made it seem like that was somehow the worst thing in the world. When you’d asked why that was a bad thing, she hadn’t answered, and so you’d just dropped it. You think you might understand a little better now, though. 

Either way, you pick your favorite dress from the group of clothes shoved far to the back of her closet, and you feel. Nervous. You’ve lived here long enough to pick up the stigmas, and the act of trying on a piece of clothing you’d admired suddenly feels like a bigger deal than it should possibly be. 

You take it to the bathroom you and Alex share to change. You stare down at the floor while you pull your own shirt off, avoiding your reflection by instinct, and think to yourself, ‘ _This isn’t a big deal_.’ ‘Cause it doesn’t _have_ to be, really. The axes of your world won’t shift whether you like it or hate it. A dress isn’t going to be a grand solution or even an answer at all. You think of Alex who is the best girl you know and how she makes a show of scoffing when Eliza tells her she should really dress nicer, and you think of the girl who sits in front of you in U.S. History who always smooths out her dress or skirt before she sits down, every day, in a way you find sort of distractingly pretty. _‘This doesn’t have to matter_.’ 

Still, when you slip the dress over your head and adjust the straps against your shoulders, you feel something deep inside you twisting. Because—you don’t look _good_ , exactly. It’s the wrong size, the loose front droops awkwardly, and the material at the hips juts out since you’d just slipped it on over your jeans. 

But. It’s a cute dress, and you _like_ it. You don’t exactly love looking at yourself, but something in your chest feels warm with the thought that maybe you could, in the future. You want to look pretty, you realize, whatever type of clothes you wear. You squint your eyes and try your best to imagine your reflection in nice, properly-fitted clothes, try to imagine yourself looking pretty or cute. And with—with longer hair… maybe? 

Alex knocks and comes in, closing the door behind her. She might notice your thoughtful look, because she puts an arm around your shoulder in a half-hug and says “You look great, kid. It suits you much better than me. That is, if you like it.” 

Your reflection smiles bright before you even register how happy you are to have a best friend like her. 

(Later, she says you can borrow her clothes whenever you like. She jokes that she’d practically throw them at you, that it’s not a big deal, she was thinking about recording a video of herself trashing them for her Myspace page anyway. But when she leans against her doorway and does her usual cool smile, you can tell she’s excited.)

-

(You’re excited, too. Because the questions you’re asking have changed. Instead of wondering what was wrong with you, you wonder what kind of girl you’d like to be. And it’s overwhelming and scary and you feel like you’re somehow, impossibly, going to mess up and there’s so many things to think about that you’d never considered before, at least in relation to yourself. It’s too much, but you feel light and floaty regardless, like one of the caged birds you’d seen at your trip to the zoo, suddenly released and allowed to fly.)

-

You finish your list of names about a week later, and proceed to look each one of them up online, doing your best to approximate the spelling the way you think it would likely be in English. 

Hours later, and you’re left with a list of just over a dozen names: Kryptonian in origin, and similar enough to existing Earth names (if sometimes obscure ones). 

It’s a start, the thought of being called a name you could have carried on Krypton filling you with excitement. 

-

You think about it for weeks, putting the list in your folder with your class notes during the day and tucking it into your nightstand drawer when you sleep, always keeping it close, as if you didn’t have the whole thing memorized, as if the pencil marks weren’t beginning to fade from being touched so much. 

-

Late one night, you’re too excited to sleep, and you wind up in her room. 

(Well, you first wind up floating into the kitchen and swiping a package of cookies from the cabinet.) 

You knock, and she lets you in. There are three different open textbooks on her desk—cramming for a math midterm, this time. 

“Thank god, you brought snacks!” she whines, already reaching for the opened cookie package.

(You might have snuck two or three on the way to her room.)

But as soon as Alex bites into a cookie, she reels back with a disgusted noise. “Really, kid!? Oatmeal raisin? Nasty!” 

“Hmm. Must be ‘cause you have bad taste.” You take the package back, gladly accept her bitten cookie. 

“Yeah, sure thing, Miss ‘Ketchup-Goes-Great-On-Scrambled-Eggs’.” 

You snag a pillow from her bed and send it sailing at her. She catches it smoothly and sets it up at her desk chair, sighing when she sits down again and leans into the new padding. 

(It’s a newer thing, the way Alex casually refers to you as a girl when it’s just the two of you. She can just talk to you now, not feeling unsure about what you are comfortable with and not needing to ask if it was okay. You love her so, so much—you’ve told her—for letting you just try this out, get your own footing. She’s safe and trustworthy, and she understands you more than anyone else in the universe. Including the person you were supposed to have been the closest with.)

“How’s the studying going,” is what you’d meant to ask. But with your mouth stuffed with three-fourths of a cookie, it comes out garbled. 

“This _sucks_ ,” Alex says back easily, as if you’d just asked a question in completely comprehensible English. “I’m gonna fail.”

You don’t believe that for a second. Alex is the smartest person you know, even if she hates school, and when she decides she’s going to do something it’s almost impossible for anyone other than Eliza to stop her. Even if that something happens to be memorizing a bunch of equations and theories at the last second for an exam. 

Either way, you sit back and let her work on her practice problems, lying in silence until she seems about ready to fall asleep at the desk and you’ve nearly finished your cookies. Finally, she leans back in her chair, tilts her head up.

“I’m taking a break,” she announces to the heavens above her, and to her ceiling fan. 

“Come sit with me, then.” You make sad little grabby hands in her direction. 

“Oh, fine,” she rolls her eyes when she says it, as if it’s a huge inconvenience for herself. Technically, she’s fallen right into your trap. You suspect she’ll be out the moment she lays down, and you’d rather her be here when she finally passes out than hunched uncomfortably over her desk.

You sit up and dangle your legs over the side of the bed, swinging them lightly against the mattress, and she sits beside you. 

“Got crumbs in my bed,” she mutters sleepily. “Nasty-ass raisin crumbs. Be there for weeks.” 

“You’re welcome,” you say, mainly because you know as well as she does her sheets are perfectly clean. “Hey, Alex?”

“Yeah, kid?” 

You shuffle a bit in place, crinkling the empty cookie packaging between your fingers. “If I, um, say a name, will you tell me what you think of it?” 

Alex rubs at her face, and you take a quick moment to feel guilty that she’s having to keep herself awake the night before a big test just to talk to you. Finally, she lowers her hand and says, “You mean, like, a name for you?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey,” she nudges her knee against your own. “It’s _your_ name. If you like it then it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”

You frown, “But,” drop your head to your chest. “But I don’t ever want to have a name you don’t like.” Your voice trembles a little bit as you speak, sounding way less sure than you’d intended. And… and Alex is looking at you a bit like you’ve said something strange, eyes wide like she’s thinking hard about something. 

You’re about to break into a nervous ramble when she thankfully responds. “That—that really means a lot to me, you know. Um. I’ll try to give good advice.” 

“Well, like, it’s just this one I was sort of thinking about…” That’s a lie, you admit. You’d thought about it a lot, more than you’d ever want to admit. It wasn’t the first one you’d considered, but it was the one that felt the best. You like it, like the way it sounds when you whisper it to your bathroom reflection, like the way it looks when you write it out slow and careful using the nice set of pens Eliza had given you, like the way it feels, like the way _you_ feel, imagining the person you could become. 

But if Alex hates it, you’ll throw the name out, of course. Alex may say your name is just supposed to be for you, but you could never be happy with something she didn’t like. Her approval means _everything_ to you. 

And so you feel your heart race when you lick your dry lips and whisper, “Kara.”

“Kara?”

“Kara.”

“Hm. I think it sounds nice. Is it Kryptonian?” Alex asks, and you lean closer to her while you nod, hoping she’ll offer more. “It sounds kind of powerful, but also kind of sweet. I, uh, I really like it—if that’s what you mean. Kara Zor-El.” 

“And Kara Danvers,” you say, practically buzzing next to her with excited energy because she _likes_ it and it sounds so good to finally hear someone else say. 

“Kara Danvers.” Alex is smiling too. She gestures towards you dramatically with her hands, turns towards the wall, speaks with an exaggerated accent: “Meet my human sister, Kara Danvers. She’s a human.” 

You laugh until you snort embarrassingly, half-worried you’ll wind up waking Eliza again but feeling too warm and fuzzy to particularly care. 

-

When you leave Alex’s room shortly later, after talking her into going to bed rather than working herself to death ‘cause she’s totally got this test, you stop in the doorway, turn back to the outline of her beneath her covers. 

“I’d like to remind you that you’re the best sister ever,” you say.

Her response is muffled by her bedsheets, but you hear it loud and clear anyway. “Yeah, I know. But I’ll let you be second best.” 

-

You crawl out the window of your room, sit back against the roof looking at the stars. You’re at the wrong angle to see the group of stars where Krypton once was, likely will be for at least the next six months. But you can still pretend that the stars above you now are the eyes of your family, of all of those who died on Krypton and left the perpetuation of their memories and culture in your hands alone, staring down at you, waiting for you to speak. 

“My name is Kara Zor-El,” you tell them. “I am the last daughter of the House of El.”


End file.
